Evolution of a Computer Nerd

I've always been a little fascinated by technology. It likely goes back to Star Wars for me, seeing that opening scene with the rebel blockade runner being pursued by that star destroyer that just kept getting longer and longer until it finally ended with these huge engines, each of which looked to my nine-year-old eyes to be close to the size of what I imagined Rhode Island was.

I don't think it's too much of a jump to go from all the cool Star Wars stuff into computers. I vaguely remember my mother bringing an Apple IIc home from school for a summer, which may have had a few text-based games like old-old-school Oregon Trail, if that. I remember my aunt and uncle having a computer in Turtle Lake, one that had a few more games on it. By this time video games were creeping into society. Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Battle Zone, Asteroids, Tempest... the classics. When my friend Todd had another Apple version up in his attic and a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

And things just kept progressing. Color printing, with old printers that used dot matrix and ribbons. Video arcades: The standard for us was Aladdin's Castle at the Mariner Mall in Superior, where I once played $12 worth of quarters in an afternoon, which I still feel a small bit of residual guilt over. Atari; the games didn't look the same as the arcade versions, but they were enough to keep us awake until late at night. I remember one year I was so psyched about a game I KNEW I was getting that I waited for my parents to leave, peeled back the tape to carefully unwrap the gift, gently open the box to take the cartridge out and play the game for a bit before putting it all back together and re-wrapping it, making sure I absolutely destroyed the box when I opened it Christmas morning to leave no evidence behind. Unquestionably, I was a devious child.

In high school I took a computer class that was just showing us how to write commands in BASIC. Even in college, back in the late 80s, computers were still largely glorified typewriters for most of us, and since I had a nice electric typewriter I'd been given for high school graduation and a video arcade in the student union, I was content. The first time I ever heard of a FAX machine was in about 1989, and when the girl in my class who was giving a presentation on them tried to explain how they worked, the concept mostly went over my head. (Plus she was really cute, so I may have been distracted from what she was saying anyway.)

My first encounter with the once-almighty CD-ROM was in student teaching, and again, I still didn't quite get it. The school where I was assigned had one computer in the media center that had a CD-ROM drive, and only the media teacher ever used it. I didn't quite get the power of the CD-ROM until I wound up in my own teaching job, and once I saw what it could do, it was an epiphany.

My first personal computer was a Macintosh Performa CD, with 8MB of memory and a hard drive that was so small by today's standards I didn't even pay attention to what size it was. And it didn't matter anyway because I played games right off the discs and saved any work on tiny little floppy disks. My first foray into the Internet was Apple's old online service, eWorld, which was really pretty bare bones but I look back at as awesome now in the same way that some people will romanticize their high school days.

And now today, having gone through 5 personal computers, 6 gaming systems, and 3 cell phones, I'm on the verge of merging all of those devices into one -- my iPhone 4 is scheduled for delivery sometime today. Yeah, it's AT&T. But you know what? I know a good number of people with iPhones, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about the service. In fact, these people have been nothing short of superlative in their praise. I was holding out for the white iPhone 4 for the longest time, but after the news reports had stories about "manufacturing difficulties" and production delays, I got spooked and went with the black one. Which doesn't matter anyway since I already picked up my free case, and it's a nice dark purple one.

So this little thing about the size of a deck of cards will allow me to make phone calls, browse the internet, video chat, e-mail, take pictures, shoot and edit HD video, pay bills, listen to music, organize my life and yes, play games. It will be able to do more than my first four computers were able to do, and it will have more data storage than those first four computers COMBINED.

Technology continues to amaze me. It makes me anxious to see what will be the next big thing someone comes up with. It also makes me hope a little bit that I don't live long enough to see robots go all Terminator on us....